20/09/2026
Tom is still on holiday and will return back to work in October. Meanwhile we feature a story of the extraordinary Swiss traveller and writer, Ella "Kini" Maillart.
In September 1935, she met up with the British writer, Peter Fleming, brother of Ian Fleming, in present day Beijing. The two travelled together to Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China that had long been closed to foreigners and was suffering from civil war. Their trip – lasting seven months and covering over 6,000 kilometers – from China to India. Her book was entitled Forbidden Journey: from Peking to Kashmir. Fleming's book was entitled News from Tartary.
When she was 13 she won a yacht race and at 20 sailed to Corsica with her girlfriend and tried to sail to the South Pacific. She took part in the 2024 Olympics games for single boat racing, the only woman competing.
In her autobiographical book Cruises and Caravans, she writes: “Sometimes I believe that skiing is responsible for having made me a rolling stone. Except when I was sailing or skiing, I felt lost, only half alive. Everything I saw or read was depressing. (World War One) The ‘war to end war’ was bringing in its train compromise, artificial ideals, and palavers that failed to establish real peace. Growing uneasiness and lack of security seemed to confirm what Spengler had called the ‘decline of the West’. ”
In 1930, she travelled to the Caucasus Mountains with Soviet youths and walked through the secret valley of Svanetia. This adventure provides the material for her first book, Among Russian Youth (Parmi la jeunesse russe; Fasquelle Editeurs, Paris 1932).
She wrote, “The more I travel the more I realise, I know nothing, the more I want to travel. One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.”
In 1932, Ella went to Russian Turkestan by train via Moscow. There she rode a horse across Kyrgyzstan and made it to the sacred Tian Shan (Tengri Tagh) mountain range. She climbed one of the mountains 5,000m and skied down using makeshift skis. She also explored Tashkent and Samarkand and rode to Amu Darya, the longest river in Central Asia. On a camel, alone, she crossed the Desert of Red Sands, avoiding Soviet checkpoints who would likely imprison or shoot her on suspicion of being a spy. She accomplished all this in her late twenties, using a compass and a paper map. Cell phone, GPS, Google maps hadn't been invented yet. She was lucky. She avoided getting robbed or kidnapped and enslaved by bandits. A bad fall or illness could have incapacitated her, and she would have died alone in the middle of nowhere.
Her book on this adventure is entitled Turkestan Solo (Des Monts célestes aux Sables rouges; Grasset, Paris 1934). It made her famous and established her credentials as a traveller writer.
“It is always ourselves that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better.” Ella Maillart
Dervla Murphy writing about Maillart said: “Sleeping under the stars is romantic, but at –25°C with an almost empty belly, it takes what most of us haven’t got.”
In 1934, she met Peter Fleming, the older brother of Ian Fleming (the future author of the James Bond series) at a party. She asked, “How do I get into the Soviet Republic in South China?” Fleming, who was then The Times’ China correspondent. replied, “You don’t,” and explained the physical dangers and bureaucratic obstacles of this remote and historically war-ravaged region. Her response? She replied, “See you in China, probably.”
In the spring of 1935 in present day Manchuria they met and embarked on a 3,500-mile journey across China from East to West. Their travel inventory included two portable Erika typewriters, two Leica cameras, coffee, 4 tins of cocoa, marmalade jam, chocolate, curry, macaroni, porridge, a bottle of Worcester sauce, six bottles of cognac, plus four boxes of to***co for Peter.
They were reluctant companions. But they helped each other. Apart from the skills of map reading, horse riding, Fleming could speak some asian languages, and his network included Chinese government officials. He was also skilled with a gun. Ella could speak Russian, a good medic, an expert photographer, and was a capable and helpful travelling companion.
Maillart wrote, “Others are keen to see if natives other than us live better than we do, without heat in pipes, ice in boxes, sunshine in bulbs, music on disks, or images gliding over a pale screen. In many places we travelled through in China and in Kashmir in 1935, we were the first polluters. We were the ones who stirred the locals’ desire for matches, for a primus cooker which I used to prepare our meals, or for a camera – all of these things they had not seen before.”
Her book, "Oasis interdites" (Forbidden Journey), written on a sojourn in Lebanon, is published in 1937 and becomes a bestseller. The sale of her book gave her a certain financial freedom, which she used to live independently and see the world.
The French writer Paul Morand: described her thus, “The woman is dressed in lambskin boots and gloved in mittens, her skin burnt by mountain air and desert winds, exploring inaccessible regions of the earth in the company of Chinese, Tibetans, Russians, and Englishmen whose socks she mends, whose wounds she heals, and with whom she sleeps in all innocence under the stars … This woman is Ella Maillart.”
Ella "Kini" Maillart was born in February 20, 1903 and passed away in her home peacefully in March 1997.
